Recently, I needed to create some screen recordings of video and audio playback on my Mac.
It’s been a while since I’ve needed to do this. Previously, I’ve used my PC for this (until recently) and it was a fairly smooth process. But now, my daily driver is a Mac. I had a workaround setup on my other Mac, but while travelling, I needed to get this setup quick and easy and frankly didn’t have time to go through the process, I’m not much of an audio/video genius, to be honest. I can follow simple guides to get things set up, cross my fingers, and hope they work. But when it comes to capturing audio and video at the same time, on a Mac, it’s always just been a headache.
Before I found the aforementioned workaround last time I had to record my Mac screen (which involved signing up to some email list, download some type of “runs in the background” software, tinkering with my Mac’s audio inputs and outputs, creating some sort of audio chain, or something? I barely understand the process…), I just assumed Quicktime would be able to handle this natively. Ultimately, I was using Quicktime after setting up all the stuff mentioned above, but it was very clunky, it would crash and freeze a lot and I’d have to rewind 10, 20 minutes and start my recordings over, or I’d not have the correct audio input setup and I’d end up with a silent video and have to do it again… Needless to say, the time spent setting it up was NOT the biggest waste of time involved.
Anyways, as I said, while travelling very recently, I needed to get this whole nonsense setup again, and I was NOT looking forward to it.
Queue the infomercial cliche: “There’s GOT to be a better way!”
Randomly, I stumbled across an app called 1001 Record on Product Hunt and it claimed to allow me to record my Mac’s screen with audio, out of the box, so that’s already miles ahead of Quicktime.
Sure enough, 1001 Record is dead-simple to setup and use. Here’s a quick rundown…
Grant permissions
As with any new app that’s going to interact with certain features on your Mac, you’ll need to quickly grant it permission first. In this case, you just click the “Enable Access” button and it brings you to your Privacy settings menu.
From there, you click the “Screen & System Audio Recoding” option and you’ll se something like this, just click the slider to grant permission. You may have to enter your user password (This password isn’t being sent to 1001 Record or anything like that, it’s just your Mac making sure that the owner of the computer is actually granting this permission.)
The app will prompt you to allow it to restart itself, and then it’ll open back up and you’re basically ready to roll. I’ll bring it up right now so you can see how it looks…
Below, you can see how it looks in the context of the screen I’m seeing as I write this blog post…
You’ll notice a few simple options on the right hand side, you can give it permission to access a webcam if you want to, for example, have your face in the corner while recording a presentation. You can grant it access to your microphone if you want to have your voice recorded while capturing your screen. The third option, that I’ve clicked in the screenshot below, allows you to “Record system audio”, which is the star of the show and exactly what I was looking for.
There’s also a handy little file management feature for anyone who (like me) isn’t the most organized. This helps me because it stops my screen recordings from getting mixed in with the rest of my files when I’m trying to work on this, and it’s a little more cohesive than the default file browser. Granted, I could always save the recordings to the same folder and not use that folder for anything else, but I find myself coming back to this window. It’s empty for the purpose of this post, since I don’t want to share the details of the TOP SECRET (just kidding) project I’m working on, but it helps organize by video clips, images, and audio recordings.
You know what, I’ll go ahead and grab a couple of quick recordings, just to show you… It gives you a quick preview of the file, some important metadata, and allows you to manage your recordings quite easily.
THE FINAL VERDICT: HUGE WIN
It took all of 3 minutes to get this set up and running, which is less time than it would take me to even find the original workaround I was using in the past, let alone to get it running properly. since I don’t have to get tangled up with different inputs and outputs to record my system audio, or have the settings reset each time I pair my AirPods, this saves a ton of time and effort.
It has the standard options you’d expect, like recording your entire screen, hand-selecting a specific area, or grabbing an entire window/app. The big deal here is just how quick and cohesive this program is to get running. Currently, they have a yearly plan for $15, or a lifetime membership for $40.
You can check out 1001 Record here: https://1001record.com/ and download it directly from the App Store.
